Monday, July 02, 2012

'The Hamlyn book of Ghosts/Horror/Mysteries/Monsters

I have always loved these series of books from Hamlyn with their fantastic painted covers by Oliver Frey.The Horror and Ghost ones I especially like and I have had mine for many years now,later I came across the Monsters and Mysteries ones which I never knew about at all untill I saw them. The books are all hardback and large format and the first 2 came with dustcovers. These are just perfect books for the young horror/monster fan and nice companion peices to Denis Gifford's 'Pictorial history of Horror movies' and Alan Frank's 'Horror Movies' & 'Monsters and Vampires'. The Hamlyn books are nicely illustrated with paintings,drawings and photos on a variety of genre subjects in fact,fiction and film.

'The Hamlyn book of Ghosts in fact and fiction' (1978) by Daniel Farson.Illustrated by Peter Archer,Mike Bell,Mike Codd,Mike Cole,Peter Kesterven,and Ivan Lapper.Special photographs by Terry Williams. The actual book is plain black with a Oliver Frey painted dustcover.

Contents:

Ghosts of historyAnimal GhostsSecret RoomsHaunted HousesApparitions & ForesightGhosts at SeaGhosts can be funAre there such things?The Ghost HuntersThere are such things!

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The Hamlyn book of Horror' (1979) by Daniel Farson.First published by Hamlyn as a Beavor paperback in (1977).

Contents:

Of Ghosts and GhoulsVampiresWerewolvesHorror storiesHorror on stage and screenAlmost HumanA geographical guide to horrorReal Horrors

What went wrong with the world?Dragons and other Mythical BeastsMonsters down belowStrange stories of Monstrous CreaturesHairy Monsters and Hairy MenPeople on showGentle GorillasKong and Monsters of the MoviesMonsters for our timeMonsters and the future

6 comments:

Hey PAUL, everybody like this kind of bookmarks because it;s always sources of the entertainment and get some knowledge, We have also recorded mostly popular serial Ayaotd in DVD set that consist with 91 episodes 7 seasons..

I have the Mysteries book. I think I would have preferred to have the Ghosts or Monsters ones when I was a kid. I wasn't so into this book. But I think now that is because it scared the crap out of me! I still have it and can't pick it up without feeling uneasy... I guess I told myself it wasn't worth looking at because I was SCARED OF IT!

I couldn't agree more with everything you've said about these books, especially having them as companion volumes to Frank and Gifford. Never knew about the Ghosts book - I might have to seek that one out!

I must have been one of the only kids at my primary school to know of peeople such as Montague Summers, Ambrose Bierce, William Seabrook, etc. and it was all thanks to these goodly tomes.

I was always fascinated by that black and white photo on the rear endpapers of the "Horror" book which was captioned "The children have never fallen for my nonsense" by Boris Karloff.

Have begun looking for these books and was hoping you could help out with a couple questions, please.

First, it seems that GHOSTS and MYSTERIES have been listed as having paperback versions on Amazon and elsewhere, with everybody pulling their details from ISBNsearch. I think that's in error, and there actually were no softcover versions published of these titles at all, but I'm not 100% certain of that yet.

Second, was curious whether the boards matched the dustjackets on GHOSTS and HORROR? In other words, does it matter if the DJ is present or not for those two titles (as far as missing out on the cover illustrations)?

Will appreciate any light you can shed on these, thanks for tipping me to them!